Hacking Las Vegas

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The Back-Spotter

The Back-Spotter can count cards without even being seated at the blackjack table. When the count gets hot — meaning the house is at a statistical disadvantage — this player will signal for the team’s bettors to swoop in.

The Spotter
The Spotter counts cards while playing at the table. Casinos screen for counters by watching for dramatic rises or drops in bets — a sure sign that a deck has gone hot or cold. A Spotter avoids detection by resolutely sticking to the minimum bet on each hand. When it’s time to start betting big to take advantage of a favorable deck, he tips off his teammates.

The Gorilla
The Gorilla doesn’t count at all: He just bets big, all the time. Typically, he adopts the pose of a drunken millionaire who has green to burn. The Spotters ensure the Gorilla’s ‘luck’ by steering him to tables where he’s got greater than even odds of winning against the house.

The Big Player
The Big Player appears to be a type well known to the casinos: the high-rolling recreational gambler who’s content to slowly bleed his money away through hours of competent play. In reality, he’s a Spotter with a Gorilla’s bankroll. He’s not only counting cards, he’s tracking the shuffle for the high cards that rob the house of its advantage. A BP always plays a good deck, so he never has to lower his bets by much.

I try to control my breathing as I stroll through Logan International Airport. Terminal C is buzzing and chaotic, an over-air-conditioned hive of college students escaping Boston for a long weekend. I am dressed like everyone else: baggy jeans, baseball hat, scuffed sneakers. But in my mind, I have as much chance of blending in as a radioactive circus clown. There's enough money hidden under my clothes to buy a two-bedroom condo. And to top it off, there's $100,000 worth of yellow plastic casino chips jammed into the backpack slung over my right shoulder.

My anxiety increases as I reach the security checkpoint. I want to turn and run, but the security guard is staring at me, and I have no choice: I show him my ticket. America West, flight 69, Boston to Vegas. The Friday night Neon Express.

He gestures with his head, and I drop my backpack onto the conveyor belt. I know the chips will show up on the X-ray machine, but even if the guard makes me open the backpack, he won't realize how much money the yellow hunks of plastic represent.

The $100 bills are another matter. This is an airport; they can drag me to a windowless room in the basement and handcuff me to a chair. They can confiscate my stash, call in the DEA, FBI, and IRS. It will be up to me to prove that I'm not a drug dealer. To customs agents, $100 bills smell like cocaine.

In reality, I'm a writer, with six pulpy thrillers under my belt, but today I'm on the scent of a real life story even more high-octane than any of my fictional jaunts. I'm ferrying money for Kevin Lewis, one of the best card counters alive. He's taking me back to his glory days when he ran a card team that hit Vegas for millions.

The guard doesn't seem to be bothered by the bulges under my clothes. He waves me through the metal detector, and I stumble toward my gate.

My heart rate has almost returned to normal when I spot Lewis standing near the back of the line of college kids waiting to board flight 69. He doesn't look up, waiting until I am right next to him to show me the edges of a mischievous grin.

"Pretty intense," he says.

I nod. His voice is full of bravado, a stark contrast to his appearance. Dressed in a gray sweatshirt and khaki shorts, Lewis looks like a stereotypical college student. His features are ethnic, but beyond that, indeterminate. He could be Asian, Latino, even Italian or Russian. He is a carbon copy of thousands of other kids who call Boston home.

"There's got to be an easier way to carry your stake," I finally say, adjusting the bricks of $100 bills that are sliding down my legs.

"Sure," Lewis responds. "We went through a gadget phase. You know, James Bond kind of stuff. But hollow crutches are a lot harder to explain to the FBI than Velcro."He isn't joking.

The truth is, Kevin Lewis isn't his real name. This amiable kid lived a double life for more than four years. In Boston, he was a straight-A engineering major at MIT. In Las Vegas, he was something more akin to a rock star. He partied with Michael Jordan and Howard Stern. He dated a cheerleader from the Los Angeles Rams and got drunk with Playboy centerfolds. He was chased off a riverboat in Louisiana and narrowly avoided being thrown into a Bahamian jail. He was audited by the IRS, tailed by private investigators, and had his picture faxed around the globe.

Along the way, he amassed a small fortune, which he keeps in neat stacks of Benjamins in a closet by his bed. It's rumored he made somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.

For six years in the 1990s, Lewis was a principal member of the MIT Blackjack Team, an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise. Funded, in part, by shadowy investors and trained in mock casinos set up in classrooms, dingy apartments, and underground warehouses across Boston, Lewis and his gang used their smarts to give themselves an incredible advantage at the only truly beatable game in the pit. A baby-faced card-counting team possessed with impressive mathematical skills — here was a novelty that turned blackjack into an arbitrage opportunity. Their system was so successful, it took nearly two years before the casinos began to catch on — engaging in a cat-and-mouse war with the well-trained MIT conspirators.

To the casinos, there's no difference between legal card counters like Lewis, who use their brains to beat the game, and the brash, increasingly high tech cheaters who steal tens of millions of dollars from the resorts every year. In response, the casinos have developed equally sophisticated means of identifying, tracking, and eliminating their enemies: i.e., anyone who doesn't consistently lose.

"It's Robin Hood against the Sheriff," Lewis says, summing it up as we wait with the Vegas-bound crowd. It's an interesting analogy, yet it falls severely short. In this story Robin Hood is stealing from the rich to give to himself. And the sheriff has a thousand eyes, covering every inch of the sky.

The Team

"It started the summer after my junior year," Lewis recalls. "I had these two friends who were always disappearing for long weekends. Both had dropped out of MIT, and neither one seemed to be interested in getting a job. And yet they always seemed to have tons of money. Hundred-dollar bills, all over the apartment."

Andre Martinez and Steve Fisher (their names, like those of the other members of the MIT Blackjack Team, have been changed) were brilliant kids with a shared anarchistic streak: Martinez had mysteriously left MIT his senior year; Fisher had likewise quit with a semester to go before graduation. Lewis was surprised when they asked to meet him late at night in a classroom on the Infinite Corridor, the long hallway that runs down the center of the MIT campus. There, he was presented to a roomful of students he recognized from his math and science courses — the core of the MIT Blackjack Team. At the helm was a man in his mid-thirties with frighteningly bad teeth and equally poor hygiene, a former assistant professor who went by the name Micky Rosa.

As Rosa explained it, the team had been around for nearly two decades. In the beginning, it was more of an after-school club, a place for mathematical geniuses to play cards and pontificate on card-counting theory. MIT being MIT — the world's premier stable of brilliant young math and science prodigies (many of whom had always been a little too smart for their own good) — it wasn't long before the blackjack club had reached an elite level of play. In recent years, their after-school hobby had become a business. Rosa had gathered more than $1 million in seed money and was organizing regular assaults on Vegas and other casino centers around the country: riverboats in Louisiana, Chicago, and Mississippi, and Indian reservations in Connecticut and Michigan. He was recruiting a select group of students, and Lewis fit the profile.

At first, Lewis was skeptical. "I'd read a bit about blackjack, and I always thought of card counters the same way the casinos thought of them. Bald white men with glasses, hunched over the cards, scrapping out their tiny advantage. But Micky was talking about something much bigger."

Cracking The CodeF. Scott SchaferFolded arms: "Be prepared to drift over to this table, because the deck is starting to heat up."

F. Scott SchaferFingering an earlobe: "What's the count?"

F. Scott SchaferHand in pocket: "The deck is really hot — bet big."

F. Scott SchaferHand in hair: "Grab your chips so we can get out of here. The pit boss is onto us!"

The Game

Blackjack is beatable.

Walk into any bookstore and head to the section on gambling. An entire industry has been spawned by the belief that a mix of mathematics and practice can unlock the casinos' coffers. Beginning with the publication of Edward Thorp's Beat the Dealer, back in 1962, an arsenal of card-counting systems has bolstered the popular notion that blackjack is the one game in the casino where the player can have an edge over the house. Unlike roulette and craps, blackjack has a memory; past play can affect future outcomes. By keeping track of the past, goes the theory, it's possible to predict, and thus take advantage of, the future.

On paper, the theory looks pretty good. Blackjack itself is a simple game. The player gets cards, the dealer gets cards, and whoever gets closer to 21 wins. Though most novices believe the object is to get the best hand possible, the real point of blackjack is merely to beat the dealer's hand. If the dealer busts (goes over 21), the player automatically wins. Since the dealer has to keep hitting until he reaches 17, a deck with more high cards than low is dangerous to the dealer. Likewise, since a natural blackjack (21) pays 1.5 to 1, a deck rich in high cards offers more chances to the player for a bigger payout. Based on these two facts, Thorp, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, developed a system to keep track of the ratio of high to low cards left in the deck. With his "hi-lo" method of counting, Thorp could beat the dealer. Adjusting both betting and play to take advantage of a high ratio, Thorp and his protégés found that it's possible to maintain an advantage over the house of approximately 2 percent. Playing against a single deck dealt down to the bottom, in a controlled environment without supervision, Thorp discovered card counting to be a sure thing.

"WE RETURNED 154 PERCENT TO OUR INVESTORS. TRY DOING THAT ON WALL STREET."

Of course, if these conditions ever existed, they certainly don't anymore. To combat the card counters, the majority of casinos use six decks, deal no more than two-thirds of the way through, and utilize thousands of video cameras to watch everyone they perceive as a potential threat. A player armed with Thorp's book, hundreds of hours of practice, and a good head for numbers can still eke out a small profit from a six-deck shoe — but since card-counting strategy relies on the player's ability to raise and lower his bet to take advantage of the count, it doesn't take long for the casino to catch on. In Las Vegas, the casino has the right to bar anyone it wants. (Atlantic City has more "civilized" rules: The casinos can't bar card counters, however they can annoy and harass them with constant shuffles, dealer changes, and other countermeasures.) Individual card counters who follow Thorp's system and succeed quickly find themselves first unwelcome and then extinct: In gaming parlance, they're dinosaurs.

By the early '70s, the casinos had overcome their initial panic. They had learned to identify and contain the enemy. So the enemy did what every good enemy does: It got smarter.

The Scheme

The team was built around card counting's major innovation since Thorp's book: a division of labor. While it's easy to spot a lone card counter raising and lowering his bet to take advantage of its highs and lows, it's much harder to catch a team of counters working together — dividing the roles of counting and betting between seemingly unrelated players. The MIT team took this division of labor even further, refining the system by cycling in fresh young faces from the deep pool of mathematical talent back in Boston. Furthermore, every member was given a faux persona, to be better able to pass unnoticed among those one might naturally find in a casino setting. But beneath the trappings of disguise there were only three basic positions: Spotters, Gorillas, and Big Players (BPs). The Spotters tended to be inconspicuous and would sit at the table, playing the minimum bet while counting the shoe. (Back-Spotters were deployed during overly crowded casino conditions and would maintain a count while standing behind the seated players.) When a count went positive — when there were a lot of high cards still to be played — a Spotter signaled either a Gorilla or a BP. Gorillas didn't count at all: They simply bet big until they were signaled that the count had gone back down. BPs were Gorillas who had graduated to a more refined style, counting along with the Spotters after being called to the table. BPs were able to maneuver along with the deal, taking advantage of shifts in the count by playing multiple hands and finding other ways to vary bets without raising the casino's attention. In either case, the player with the large action (bets of $1,000 a hand or more) didn't act like a counter. He entered big and hardly varied his bet. Likewise, the Spotters always bet the minimum, never raising or lowering no matter what the count. Neither type of player fit the mold the casino pit bosses had been trained to look for. And since the Spotters called the BP into the game only when the deck was hot, the big money was played only in highly advantageous circumstances.

The team worked at the mathematics — the expected advantages, the proper Spotter payouts, the appropriate BP betting scheme — in rigorous detail, with the aid of computers and countless hours of simulated play. Average profit percentages ranged from between 10 and 20 percent per gambling foray, but could go much higher depending on the number of open tables and the number of possible player hours. "The first year I played, we returned 154 percent to our investors," brags Lewis. "That's after paying off expenses. You try and do that on Wall Street." The real genius of the MIT scheme was how it turned the casinos' own profiling techniques against them, using stereotypes to camouflage the big money bets.

The MIT team thrived by choosing BPs who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand. Like many on the team, Kevin Lewis was part Asian, and could pass as the child of a rich Chinese or Japanese executive. "When you're recruiting, you don't recruit white kids. They look conspicuous. Asian kids, Greek kids, dark skin fits in better with lots of money in the casinos. White 20-year-olds with $2 million bankrolls stand out," explains Andrew Tay, one of Lewis' teammates. "A geeky Asian kid with $100,000 in his wallet didn't raise any eyebrows."

Playing against type was also part of the formula. Jill Thomas is red-haired, blue-eyed, and partial to miniskirts — a high-powered consultant who graduated at the top of her class from Harvard Business School. Nobody would ever guess that she had spent hundreds of hours training in mock casinos set up by the MIT team. "During the day, I'd dress like I was going to the pool. At night, I'd wear tons of makeup and a low-cut top. I'd play the dumb chick, and nobody ever suspected I was spotting. The pit bosses helped me play my hands."

To further confuse the casinos and to push profits even higher, Lewis and his buddies mastered practical techniques that expanded on card-counting theory, with almost magical results. Two of the tricks that became a staple of the MIT system, shuffle tracking and ace tracking, exploit a concept called the nonrandom shuffle. Because of time constraints, blackjack dealers cannot achieve completely random redistributions during the shuffle. This means that certain packets of cards remain close enough together to be "tracked" through the deck. By watching a group of low cards, for example, it's possible to cut the deck (players assist the dealer by placing the cut card into the shuffled stack) in such a way that some low cards never have to be played. Likewise, a good shuffle tracker can "predict" a string of high cards and raise his bet even before the count goes positive.

Along with tracking groups of high or low cards, a trained counter can spot individual aces or even series of aces. Since drawing an ace adds roughly a 37 percent advantage to the player's expected take, tracking a series of aces through the shuffle can be extremely profitable. And again, ace tracking helps in camouflaging counting play: The BP raises his bet to "predict" the ace, not based on the count.

It didn't take long for Kevin Lewis to realize that the MIT team had taken card counting to an entirely new level. Before heading to Vegas, he had to pass a variety of tests, all held in mock casinos spread throughout Boston. His first task was mastering the art of spotting. Martinez and Rosa dealt him hand after hand, asking for the count at various intervals.

"Martinez would try and distract me, asking all sorts of questions, making me fill out comp tickets — harassing me just like a real casino pit boss," Lewis recalls. "One time, they even had some girls dress up like cocktail waitresses to try and make me lose my count."

After passing the Spotter test, Lewis moved on to the BP exam. Called to a table midplay, a BP has to take the running count and convert it into the more accurate "true count," by estimating how many cards are still left in the shoe. That's because a count of plus 10 — a ratio of 10 extra high cards to low left to be played — has a much higher value when there is only one deck left in the shoe, as opposed to six. Once the true count is established, a BP has to determine the proper bet. On the test, Lewis was asked to make highly complex decisions — such as when to split pairs against certain counts — while Martinez and Rosa graded his play from across the room.

"One mistake can cost a team a large amount of their expected advantage," Lewis says. "We had these charts calculated out that could tell you what a single error in play costs in terms of profit."

After passing the BP exam, Lewis moved to real world application. During Lewis' first weekend in Vegas, the team made $100,000. He was hooked and soon became one of the team's premier players. Personally, he didn't have problems with the ethics of the venture. "It isn't really even gambling. It's no different than the stock market. We use our brains to earn a profit. It isn't illegal. And it isn't cheating."

But it was something Lewis decided to keep secret from his family and friends, separating his Vegas lifestyle from his world in Boston. He knew that others wouldn't understand. A Lewis classmate who decided against joining the team put voice to Lewis' concerns.

"They approached me my junior year," says Matt Devonshire, summing it up over a friendly game of poker. "I wanted no part of it.

I didn't care that it wasn't technically illegal. It just felt wrong. There was so much about it that seemed so shady."

The Life

Fake names. Fake IDs. Individual bankrolls in the hundreds of thousands. VIP suites. Limousines with fully stocked minibars. Casino hosts offering carte blanche in a city that had built its reputation on easy access to a thousand different forms of sin. For a group of young math and engineering geeks, this was heaven on earth. In the beginning, Rosa ran the team like a business, enforcing stringent rules against alcohol, fraternizing with the local fauna, any extracurriculars that didn't involve blackjack felt and hi-lo ratios. But as the real money began to pour in, Lewis and his teammates broke out, starting their own squads with their own capital.

"I was Donkey Boy my first trip out," reminisces Andrew Tay, speaking of the spring of 1994. "We were at one of the clubs; I think it was at the Hard Rock. Lewis hands me a Ziploc bag. 'Put this in your pants,' he tells me. 'What is it?,' I say. 'Don't ask.' It slipped down my leg as I walked across the dance floor. I went to the bathroom and pulled it out. It was $200,000 in chips."

Over the next year, the profits continued to multiply at a staggering rate. Although there were losing weekends — Lewis described how one night he blew $100,000 in just two hands — over time, the team was mathematically destined to win. The more hands played, the more certain the profits.

"Around July 4, 1995," Lewis recalls, "we had this phenomenal weekend. All told, we won about $400,000. A bunch of us were sitting around the pool at the Mirage, and I had a duffel bag under my lounge chair. The duffel had $950,000 in cash inside. I was 22 years old. What the hell was I going to do with that kind of money?"

At the time, the casinos made it easy to stay liquid. This was before the era of the CTR — the cash transaction report — which obligates the casinos to report any transaction greater than $10,000. "In the old days," Tay explains, "you'd win a quarter-million dollars, and they'd give it to you in cash. On New Year's 1996, I walked from the Mirage to the MGM Grand with a paper New Year's hat filled with $180,000." Back in Boston, Lewis and his friends kept the money in cash, declaring the winnings in the "other" category on their IRS forms. "You'd find $100 bills all over my apartment. Dig in my laundry, there would be $100,000 under my socks."

Although the money was a testament to the brilliance of the MIT system, the overwhelming success began to breed a sense of paranoia. Things were getting too easy: With each mega-casino that opened on the Vegas landscape, the pot of potential riches seemed to grow bigger. Other card-counting teams were cropping up at an alarming rate, some reportedly having as many as 100 members. At major casino openings, it wasn't unusual to see dozens of Spotters working the same pit. Sooner or later, Lewis felt, someone was going to notice what they were doing.

The paranoia, it turns out, was justified. With the mega-resorts came a new influx of corporate money — and a corporate sense of cautiousness. The new casinos had billion-dollar price tags; Vegas had more to lose than ever before.

The Heat

My first few days in Las Vegas, I get a small taste of the new paranoia. I awake one morning to discover that my laptop has been stolen out of my locked hotel room while I slept. The next afternoon, I meet with Beverly Griffin, head of the Griffin Detective Agency, the leading "intelligence provider" to the gaming community worldwide. She agrees to see me — but wants to meet in a crowded outdoor café adjacent to the Paris hotel — a chaotic public setting. It's impossible to use a tape recorder, or otherwise get her words on permanent record.

"For 34 years, we've been out here on the Strip collecting information for clients all over the world," she begins, her kindly features muted by the shadow of a faux Eiffel Tower. "Almost every casino in the world uses us. We've got agents working 24 hours a day, covering every shift at every hotel. If someone wins a bunch of money, leaves one casino, and walks down the street to another, you can be sure we'll have someone watching him when he gets there."

The most important weapon in the war against counters and cheaters is information. The Griffin Agency has spent more than three decades developing new methods of gathering and relaying that information, acting as the eyes, ears, and arms of nearly every casino on earth. In the beginning, it was all about the human element: agents following suspects across the casino floor, identifying them from grainy stills taken by security cameras hidden above the gambling pit — the familiar Eyes in the Sky. Using these photos — and thousands of hours of investigative legwork — Griffin was able to compile a legendary facebook, providing photos, names, aliases, known accomplices, even home addresses and phone numbers of people who win too much too often. Anyone who ended up in the Griffin Book was in danger of being barred from any casino that employed the agency — that is, if someone on the casino floor was lucky enough to notice the offender and make a facebook match. In the beginning, it was just this sort of luck — or old-fashioned detective work — that broke the biggest card counters.

"The team play confused us at first," Griffin explains. "I remember when Ken Uston — perhaps the father of card counting — hit us hard for a year, maybe more. We'd been watching him at Caesars, and we couldn't figure out how he was winning. Then one afternoon, my husband went to a tennis match and saw Uston sitting in the stands. Next to him were a few other people my husband recognized from the tables at Caesars — people Uston had pretended not to know. We realized they had been spotting, and figured the whole thing out."

In recent years, Griffin has taken her facebook high tech, combining advances in facial recognition technology with sophisticated data-mining software. Do two seemingly unrelated players always appear in the same casinos at the same time? Did a consistent winner and a pit boss once share a phone number? "If someone is winning a lot, you can bet we're going to be called in. Because in a casino, these things can go bad very, very fast," explains Griffin. "A lot of money can be lost in a short amount of time, and with the high tech cheaters, it's even worse."

While card counters use math to ensure a modest but steady winning streak over a long period of play, high tech cheaters opt for the quick hit-and-run. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist and founder of Systems Research & Development, the company that created much of the software used by Griffin, invites me to his office on the outskirts of Vegas for a tour of the more effective tech tricks of the cheating trade.

"Smile for the camera," he exclaims, brandishing a tiny plastic lens the size and shape of a jacket button. "This is the smallest fully operational TV station in the commercial industry. It literally broadcasts TV-quality visuals. Some guy will sit down at a card table with this camera attached to his sleeve, an antenna on his back, and a lithium battery in his belt, and broadcast the image to a van outside with a satellite dish. A guy in the van will slow down the video so you can actually see the cards that flash by during a shuffle." Another cheater Jonas once caught was wearing gloves in the middle of summer: It turned out he had a computer attached to his hand, keeping track of cards by tapping his fingers.

Members of the MIT team tell me about a group that tags the high cards in a deck with minute traces of radioactive isotopes. Team members wear Geiger counters attached to their knees, getting positive readings when the high cards come out of the shoe. There's another tale about a scammer who marks cards with ink that can only be seen with special red-filtered contact lenses.

Getting caught is no small affair. Cheating at cards in Nevada can carry a sentence of up to 10 years. Card counting, on the other hand, will merely get you kicked out of the casino for good. But to Griffin and the surveillance establishment, the distinction between cheaters and counters is irrelevant. "Our job is to provide the casinos with information to explain why someone is winning," Griffin says. "It's up to the casinos as to what they want to do with the information."

Jeff Jonas makes no attempt to hide his contempt for the professionals who use math instead of miniature cameras to beat the system. "These teams of card counters are a new definition of organized crime. They use the Internet to recruit each other, to share vulnerabilities of casinos and even specific dealers, and they are always searching for ways to gain an unfair advantage over the house."

WHEN THEY FOUND HIM, HE WAS LYING IN THE TUB, THE DUFFEL CLENCHED TO HIS CHEST.

The irony is that a bad counter often will play a more negative game than a solid player who is simply using basic strategy. One mistake per hour obliterates a counter's advantage, and two an hour is more costly than not counting at all. According to Andrew Tay, casinos know this and so rather than automatically ejecting a known counter, they'll "watch his play, track his wins and losses, and if he's identified as a bad counter, they'll comp him a room, make him feel like a king, and laugh as his 'positive' game slowly bleeds him dry."

In the end, the MIT team was brought down by its own success. They were too good at what they did, too smart to remain unnoticed forever. By the end of the decade, Griffin was onto them. As we exit the caf’, she says, "There's always a way to get inside these teams. Sooner or later, someone gets cold feet. Or someone gets greedy."

Then, without prompting, she adds a seeming non sequitur. "What would your mother think if she spent all that money to send you to MIT and you turned into a professional card counter?"

I had never mentioned to her the real focus of my article. Perhaps my paranoia wasn't misplaced.

The Fall

"I still remember the first time I got barred," Kevin Lewis says. "It was at the Rio. I had just sat down to play. I had $500 in the betting circle. Then these two guys in suits came up behind me. One of them pushed my money out of the circle. 'We can't let you play here anymore,' he told me. Then he tried to get me to go downstairs to the basement of the casino with him. I ran right out of there."

Lewis and I are sitting in a 2,000-square-foot suite at the top of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. There's a widescreen TV, a fully stocked bar, leather couches, and a picture window overlooking the twinkling neon strip. This is one of four "celebrity suites" spread out across Las Vegas that Lewis has access to this evening, all complimentary, arranged by various casino hosts who know nothing about his past. All they see are the dollar signs on his bankroll, and the action he's willing to put down at the tables. It's not enough to be rich. You've also got to be willing to play.

"Pretty soon," he continues, "we started to get heat every second or third trip."

In Boston a week earlier, Martinez had described a frightening encounter at another casino in town. He had been playing all night at the high-stakes tables and had returned to his room sometime after 2 in the morning. There was a loud knock on the door, someone identifying himself as hotel security. Martinez grabbed his duffel bag full of chips and tried to find someplace to hide. When they found him, he was lying in the bathtub, the duffel clenched to his chest.

They took him to the basement. "They asked me to stand against the wall so they could take a picture. I refused. Then they asked me to sign something that said I would never return to the hotel."

"It's called back-rooming," Jill Thomas explains. "It's an intimidation technique. They can't legally do anything to you, so they try and scare you. They read you the trespass act — if you return to the casino in the future, you'll be trespassing, and then they can arrest you."

The troubles came to a head for Lewis' MIT team on a weekend excursion to Shreveport, Louisiana. The group had traveled to play the riverboat casinos — replicas of 19th-century paddle wheelers — located on the Red River. The first stop was a place called the Horseshoe, a 25-story hotel attached to a garish floating casino. About halfway through the evening, Lewis was walking by one of the blackjack pits when he saw something that caught his eye.

"There was this group of floor people — pit bosses and a shift manager — standing around a fax machine. There were pages coming off the fax, dark with ink. I got a little closer and saw one of the guys pull off a page full of pictures. I knew we were in deep trouble."

Lewis signaled his team and headed for the parking lot. The suits followed, chasing him all the way outside. Running for the car, Lewis had a moment of pure terror.

"Here I am in the middle of nowhere. Is anyone going to notice if some Asian kid disappears in Shreveport, Louisiana?"

Back in Boston, Lewis' people discovered that their problems were just beginning. It turned out someone associated with the MIT team had sold a list of member names to the enemy, reportedly for $25,000. In Griffin's words, someone had gotten greedy. Still in their mid-twenties, Lewis and his friends were fast becoming dinosaurs.

"Even Robin Hood has to know when it's time to quit," Lewis says, looking over the Strip from his celebrity suite. "It was getting to the point where we couldn't walk into a blackjack pit without some suit coming up behind us. They were even coming after our Spotters."

By mid 1997, the state of tension caused a rift in the team, eventually splitting the group in half. After Shreveport, Martinez and Fisher formed their own group and continue today to hit the casinos on a monthly basis. Lewis decided to go it on his own, forming an alliance with Jill Thomas and Andrew Tay. Then a few months later, someone broke into Thomas' apartment, stealing more than $50,000 in blackjack winnings from a safe in her bedroom. Although he has no proof, Lewis suspects that the robbery had something to do with the MIT team. Maybe someone on the inside sold out — or perhaps one of the cats was trying to send the mice a little message. Either way, Lewis decided he had had enough. When, just two months after the robbery, he was audited by the IRS, he made the decision to stop playing professionally.

"We could have kept playing, like Martinez and the others. But it just wasn't worth it anymore. The double life had gotten too difficult."

"So that was it?" I ask. "You just took yourself out of the game?"

Lewis doesn’t answer, but I see a hint of mischief in his eyes.

The Player

Rock music blares in my ears as I trail Lewis through the Hard Rock casino. The Hard Rock isn’t like any other gambling den in Nevada: It’s cool, it’s hip, it’s more LA than Vegas, all done up in wood tones and plush velvet. Loud and young and in-your-face, from the Harley-Davidson in the lobby to the Playboy-style grotto out back, it’s the ultimate Friday night scene. Lorded over by beautiful blond waitresses in black miniskirts and dark stockings, the crowd tends toward models, actresses, and A-list celebrities, all vying for one another’s attention.

I wade through — and in truth, at the moment I fit right in. My hair is slicked back. My shirt is open two buttons at the neck. A borrowed charcoal-colored Armani jacket drapes over my shoulders like a cape. Inside, I am Jell-O, but I don’t let it show. I try to mimic the way Lewis moves through the casino. I copy his swagger, walking in long strides as if my cock runs halfway down my leg. Like the casino itself, I am cool, I am hip. I pretend I am rich enough to be strolling toward the high-stakes blackjack pit, rich enough to smile at the dealers and wink at the cocktail waitresses. Tonight, I’m a player.

‘This looks good,’ Lewis says, stopping at a table in a corner of the pit. He drops onto one of the stools, gesturing for me to sit next to him. I look at the little plastic card on the felt, and see that the minimum bet is $300. I cough, breaking character, and Lewis smiles.

‘Maybe I’ll spot you the first few hands.’

He pulls out a roll of $100 bills — cash that I had smuggled through airport security a week earlier — and drops it onto the felt in front of me. I’m no Rain Man, but I can count along with the dealer. Twenty thousand dollars.

‘Kevin ”

He waves me silent, as the dealer finishes shuffling the deck and stacks the cards in the plastic shoe. A cocktail waitress brings us drinks — matching glasses of Jack Daniel’s, easy on the ice — and we each exchange a few thousand dollars for chips, leaving $300 in our respective betting circles. The cards start to come out, and I settle into the game, playing basic strategy like Lewis has taught me.

Ten minutes pass in near silence. I keep to the minimum bet, and I notice that Lewis’ pile of chips changes shape as we move deeper into the deck. I try to see if he’s counting, but it seems he isn’t even paying attention. His head is cocked to the side, his face relaxed, his eyes barely moving. It takes me a moment to realize that, indeed, he is watching the cards — through the reflection in my whiskey glass.

I start to follow him more carefully, raising my own bet with his. After a few hands, he notices what I’m doing and laughs. OK, he seems to tell me. Let’s play a little.

Over the next hour, I am treated to a display of pure talent. By midway through the shoe, Lewis has spread out to cover three betting circles, all with minimum bets of more than $1,000. He’s splitting tens and cutting to aces; he’s playing all the tricks I’ve researched and read about, and he’s letting me tag along. Pretty soon we’re up $12,000. I am about to double my bet for what looks to be the last hand of the shoe, when I notice that Lewis’ hand is suddenly in his hair. I know from my research that the movement isn’t natural; it’s a signal from Lewis’ gaming days, an alarm — get up, get out, now. I look up and see two men approaching from the other side of the high-stakes pit. Both are wearing dark suits with stiff lapels, and the taller of the two is talking into a cell phone.

I see Lewis gathering up his chips, and I start to do the same. The dealer asks if we want to cash out, but before either of us can answer, one of the suited men steps forward.

‘Mr. Lewis, can we speak to you for a moment?’

Lewis shoves his remaining chips into his pockets and pushes back from his stool.

‘We were just leaving.’

I scoop up my own chips, nearly upending my stool as I step away from the table. I can see the other gamblers in the crowded pit looking over at us, whispers rising above the rock ‘n’ roll. I feel a mixture of fear and pride as the two men in suits begin to escort us out of the blackjack area. When we reach the edge of the pit, the taller of the two puts his hand on Lewis’ shoulder.

‘Mr. Lewis, we can’t have you playing blackjack here anymore.’

Lewis’ eyebrows rise, indignant and surprised. I know it’s an act. He has heard this before.

‘Why not?’ Lewis asks, more for me than for appearances.

The suit spreads his hands, palms out.

‘You’re too good for us.’

He’s smiling, but I can tell from his voice that he’s dead serious. He doesn’t want us anywhere near the blackjack tables, because he watched us play from some security roost above the casino floor, analyzing our moves through the Eyes in the Sky. He sees Kevin Lewis as a threat to his casino, a danger to his bottom line.

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